“Being ready with full support for Intel Xeon Phi from day one has been a key strategy for Allinea and underpins our approach for supporting customers, such as Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Trinity system, Argonne National Laboratory on Theta and NERSC on Cori, where work is now underway to port code and get applications ready for more complex science on a larger scale.”

Six application development teams from NERSC gathered at Intel in early August for a marathon “dungeon session” designed to help tweak their codes for the next-generation Intel Xeon Phi Knight’s Landing manycore architecture and NERSC’s new Cori supercomputer. “We try to prepare ahead of time to bring the types of problems that can only be solved with the experts at Intel and Cray present—deep questions about the architecture and how applications use the Xeon Phi processor. It’s all geared toward optimizing the codes to run on the new manycore architecture and on Cori.”

Today the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it will invest $16 million over the next four years to accelerate the design of new materials through use of supercomputers. “Our simulations will rely on current petascale and future exascale capabilities at DOE supercomputing centers. To validate the predictions about material behavior, we’ll conduct experiments and use the facilities of the Advanced Photon Source, Spallation Neutron Source and the Nanoscale Science Research Centers.”

Today NERSC announced plans to host a new, data-centric event called Data Day. The main event will take place on August 22, followed by a half-day hackathon on August 23. The goal: to bring together researchers who use, or are interested in using, NERSC systems for data-intensive work.

Katie Antypas from NERSC presented this talk at the 2016 MSST conference. Katie is the Project Lead for the NERSC-8 system procurement, a project to deploy NERSC’s next generation supercomputer in mid-2016. The system, named Cori, (after Nobel Laureate Gerty Cori) will be a Cray XC system featuring 9300 Intel Knights Landing processors. The Knights Landing processors will have over 60 cores with 4 hardware threads each and a 512 bit vector unit width. It will be crucial that users can exploit both thread and SIMD vectorization to achieve high performance on Cori.”

Berkeley Lab recently hosted the fourth annual X-Stack PI event, where X-Stack researchers, facilities teams, application scientists, and developers from national labs, universities, and industry met to share the latest developments in X-Stack application codes. “X-Stack was launched in 2012 by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program to support the development of exascale software tools, including programming languages and libraries, compilers and runtime systems, that will help programmers handle massive parallelism, data movement, heterogeneity and failures as the scientific community transitions to the next generation of extreme-scale supercomputers.”

In this video from SC15, NERSC shares its experience on optimizing applications to run on the new Intel Xeon Phi processors (code name Knights Landing) that will empower the Cori supercomputer by the summer of 2016. “A key goal of the Cori Phase 1 system is to support the increasingly data-intensive computing needs of NERSC users. Toward this end, Phase 1 of Cori will feature more than 1,400 Intel Haswell compute nodes, each with 128 gigabytes of memory per node. The system will provide about the same sustained application performance as NERSC’s Hopper system, which will be retired later this year. The Cori interconnect will have a dragonfly topology based on the Aries interconnect, identical to NERSC’s Edison system.”

“In this presentation, we will discuss several important goals and requirements of portable standards in the context of OpenMP. We will also encourage audience participation as we discuss and formulate the current state-of-the-art in this area and our hopes and goals for the future. We will start by describing the current and next generation architectures at NERSC and OLCF and explain how the differences require different general programming paradigms to facilitate high-performance implementations.”

Today Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, and Sandia national laboratories announced the Alliance for Application Performance at Extreme Scale (APEX). The new collaboration will focus on the design, acquisition and deployment of future advanced technology high performance computing systems.

Today NERSC announced a collaboration with UC Berkeley’s AMPLab and Cray to design large-scale data analytics stacks. “Analytics workloads will be an increasingly important workload on our supercomputers and we are thrilled to support and participate in this key collaboration,” said Ryan Waite, senior vice president of products at Cray. “As Cray’s supercomputing platforms enable researchers and scientists to model reality ever more accurately using high-fidelity simulations, we have long seen the need for scalable, performant analytic tools to interpret the resulting data. The Berkeley Data Analytics Stack (BDAS) and Spark, in particular, are emerging as a de facto foundation of such a toolset because of their combined focus on productivity and scalable performance.”

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

According to Intel, its new 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor family includes Intel Deep Learning Boost for AI deep learning inference acceleration, fresh features and support for Intel Octane DC (data center) persistent memory, and more. Learn more about the offerings in a new issue of Parallel Universe Magazine. [READ MORE…]

White Papers

Previously, oil and gas firms relied on costly, central processing unit (CPU) intensive infrastructure to manage data usage and analysis speed. GPUs for oil and gas firms have given rise to a new set of opportunities. Download the new report from Penguin Computing outlines how the adoption of GPU-accelerated computing can offer oil and gas firms significant return on investment (ROI) today and pave the way to gain additional advantage from future technical developments.